VR‐Rides: An object‐oriented application framework for immersive virtual reality exergames

Abstract

Exercise can improve health and well-being. With this in mind, immersive virtual reality (VR) games are being developed to promote physical activity, and are generally evaluated through user studies. However, building such applications is time consuming and expensive. This paper introduces VR-Rides, an object-oriented application framework focused on the development of experiment-oriented VR exergames. Following the modular programming pattern, this framework facilitates the integration of different hardware (such as VR devices, sensors, and physical activity devices) within immersive VR experiences that overlay game narratives on Google Street View panoramas. Combining software engineering and interaction patterns, modules of VR-Rides can be easily added and managed in the Unity game engine. We evaluate the code efficiency and development effort across our VR exergames developed using VR-Rides. The reliability, maintainability, and usability of our framework are also demonstrated via code metrics analysis and user studies. The results show that investing in a systematic approach to reusing code and design can be a worthwhile effort for researchers beyond software engineering. K E Y W O R D Scode reuse, exergame, immersive virtual reality, object-oriented application framework, reusable component, Unity INTRODUCTIONVirtual reality (VR) software applications are useful tools for human-computer interaction (HCI) studies that require users to be immersed in a controlled environment. There are an increasing number of freely available software tools, plug-ins, programming libraries, and packages that employ recent advances in VR for use by the HCI research community. One such example is VR exercise video games (exergames), with different VR exergames used in physical education classes, 1,2 physical health in older adults, 3,4 and physical rehabilitation and therapy. 5,6 These applications are expected to be employed, integrated and improved by researchers and developers in their HCI projects, thus reducing the time, effort, and cost for creating customized applications. But the commercial VR systems, generally games, used are not systematically engineered to be adapted by researchers or to run research studies. For example, VR systems and games focus primarily on enhancing the immersion and enjoyment of user wearing the head-mounted display (HMD), which ignores the collaboration of non-HMD user. In order to study the interaction in collaborative VR, Gugenheimer et al 7 built a system with VR platform, projectors, gamepad, and Softw: Pract Exper. 2020;50:1305-1324.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/spe

Experiments as Code: A Concept for Reproducible, Auditable, Debuggable, Reusable, & Scalable Experiments

“…The data analysis is usually not considered by second generation frameworks (but see Grübel et al, 2016;Wang et al, 2020). The general move towards pre-registration makes integrating data analysis into frameworks a key requirement to enable researchers to actually go through with pre-registration without a massive overhead.…”

“…This component group provides an API to the first component detailing how to collect and store the data. Any bmlTUX (Bebko and Troje, 2020) Unity EVE (Grübel et al, 2016) Unity * * DeFINE Unity Landmarks Unity * NVR-DeSciL Unity VRate Unity VREVAL Unreal -VREX Unity * * * VR-Rides (Wang et al, 2020) Unity * USE (Watson et al, 2019) Unity UXF (Brookes et al, 2019) Unity Symbols: : Feature, *: Partial Feature, -: Not possible, † : Never implemented Table 1: Comparison of current VR frameworks since 2015. The features are grouped by correspondence to the 6 pillars taxonomy of the ExaC paradigm.…”

“…However, these frameworks were rapidly eclipsed by game engines (i.e., Unity and Unreal) and became quickly obsolete. Over the last five years, a second generation of VR frameworks (Grübel et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2018;Brookes et al, 2019;Watson et al, 2019;Bebko and Troje, 2020;Wang et al, 2020; has put the experiment design at the core of the framework. Technical issues such as rendering, physics and specialized hardware have been delegated to the underlying game engines such as Unity or Unreal and third-party libraries to integrate Human Interface Devices (HIDs; e.g.…”

“…Only a few frameworks opt for databases (i.e. Grübel et al, 2016;Howie and Gilardi, 2020;Wang et al, 2020;Brookes et al, 2019) because they have more complex use cases in mind. Large amounts of raw data from different sources make text files unwielding and require more effective data assembly.…”

Virtual Reality Language Lab of Second Language Learning Based on J Bruner’s Discovery Learning and Self-Efficacy Theory—Literature Review and Solution Improvement

“…On the aspect of educational games, in 2017.12, Julie M. Sykes focuses on how to use digital games in the context language learning and finds some solutions to increase approaches to community-based and commercial games, as well as to make consequential incorporation of virtual reality [2]. In 2020.1, Yifan Wang developed VR-Rides, an object-oriented programming module focused on the development of experiment-oriented VR games [3].…”